


In Safe Hands

by emily_420



Category: Gintama
Genre: F/F, something akin to character study, themes of death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-23
Updated: 2015-08-23
Packaged: 2018-04-16 19:48:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4638018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emily_420/pseuds/emily_420
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fire, like most things, is multifaceted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Safe Hands

Tatsumi knows fire as: death, destruction; loss, grieving; charring and crackling buildings breaking beneath the force of it as easily as life too succumbed. It’s something that takes and breaks and devastates. This is a lesson she learnt when she was young and it’s a lesson that she has carried with her from that point onward. Everyone around her fights fire, like a wild beast that needs taming, a many-headed creature that unfailingly grows back no matter how many necks you sever. She does, too – fancies herself something of a warrior, out on the front lines doing her duty to protect everyone. It’s more personal than that, too, though; the thought of another little girl losing her family because she wasn’t there to stop it makes something crawl up her throat and push behind her eyes.

At times it’s almost overwhelming, the hopelessness of it. Fires will start no matter what, she thinks; people will die no matter what. You’ll get over it, the guys tell her; everyone feels that way sometimes, but in the end we still make a change and that’s what you should focus on.

She wonders what is right, which perspective is rooted in reality. She wonders when she became so aware of the fragility of life, so aware that there are an endless number of forces trying to push your life to a close sooner rather than later. It creeps around the edges of her worldview, like the singed corners of a sheet of paper.

It all comes back to fire. Tatsumi figures she herself to be a charred, half-burnt thing that came too close to becoming ashes, a house rebuilt that doesn’t look the same. Fire ruined her and gave her purpose; it is both her livelihood and her misery and most of the time, she resents it.

* * *

 

Tetsuko knows fire as: a tool to be utilised; a catalyst; the medium through which she makes her living. Tetsuko has tamed fire, made it work for her; she controls it with masterful skill. Tatsumi finds watching her work soothing, takes comfort in the fact that fire can craft just as it can destroy. In Tetsuko’s workshop, fire doesn’t blaze so much as smoulder; it’s small and contained and warm instead of roaring and scorching and spreading. It’s almost _cheery,_ and when she’s there, Tatsumi feels like it isn’t so bad, like she can learn not to hate it again.

With her small, callused hands Tetsuko shows her a different side of life, and just as she alleviates Tatsumi’s worries, Tatsumi can soothe hers. Swords are ultimately a tool for killing, Tetsuko says, but Tatsumi returns: They are also for protecting. Tetsuko knows this well; what is harder is for Tatsumi, too, to digest that neither fire nor swords are inherently evil; they just are, and the circumstances they appear under, the hands they are wielded with determine the actions.

Struggling with their own ideals, they both try to let things just Be, to exist in the life they have without agonising over the nature of it, to spend their time together happily and not in an existential crisis.

And it works, because they’re both in safe, careful, knowing hands.


End file.
